Customer Reviews

The Torso In The Town (Fethering Mysteries)

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A headless, armless torso is found by the host's young son, in the cellar of one of the better houses in a small town, during a dinner party, and so the local gossip begins! Elements of mysteries, illicit love affairs and all of the petty gossip that small towns thrive upon, emerge as everyone speculates on firstly, the identity of the victim and secondly, upon the murderer.Friends Carol Seddon and her next door neighbour, Jude,play detective as a relief from the boredom and insularity of small town life and uncover many secrets involving the town's inhabitants.The story is written in a light hearted way and in the elegant style of many other English mystery tales...I thoroughly enjoyed it !

I love this series. Torso in the Town is not my favorite installment, but it's a good one nonetheless. I think the reason I didn't enjoy this one as much is because the townspeople were either excruciatingly annoying or downright evil. In the other books in the series, the townspeople are just quirky and you like to laugh at them. In this book, there just seemed to be more of a menacing tone. Also, there was poor Carole and her breakup with Ted. The woman isn't exactly sunshine and rainbows on her normal days, so you can imagine what she's like after an embarassing breakup.

All that aside, the plot itself is well written and the mystery is tight and interesting. As usual, the revealing of the culprit is a tantalizingly slow, heart-pounding climax. Brett once again throws red herrings everywhere. I absolutely did not predict the culprit correctly.

So other than my slight disappointment with the characters, I enjoyed this book. I look forward to Stabbing in the Stables, which is coming out in August 2006!

One of my best friends is always asking me for new stories he can tell. He loves to use stories to entertain those at the right and left of him at dinner parties. Presumably, if he had actually attended the dinner party that opens up this book, he would never again need another story.

The Torso in the Town is the third Fethering mystery featuring Carole Seddon (mid-fifties divorced, retired Home Office bureaucrat) and her relatively new neighbor Jude (an alternative healer who has no obvious source of income of about the same age). Carole is sedate, introverted, and concerned about appearances. Jude is a full-tilt boogier, loves people, and cannot wait to get involved in whatever is going on. They share a love of solving local mysteries, especially murders, as amateurs.

One of the charms of this series comes in the clever plots that Simon Brett puts together to allow Carole and Jude to get at the facts to make their discoveries. In this case, Jude has been invited to have dinner with old acquaintances who have recently moved to Fedborough, just up the river Fether from Fethering where Carole and Jude live. Before the meal is done, her hosts' son races up to announce that he's found a body in the basement. In rummaging around behind a wall, the boy had located an old box . . . from which dropped a shriveled human torso. Talk about dropping your turkey on the floor in front of your guests on Thanksgiving!

Carole, meanwhile, is licking her wounds after her brief relationship with local pub keeper, Ted Crisp. She feels embarrassed and doesn't want to be seen. This makes Carole even more standoffish than usual. Jude's story of the torso helps Carole ooze out of her hurting shell. It turns out that Carole had recently been consulting an interior decorator who used to live in the home where the torso was found. Carole finds it easy to drop by and find out what she can learn.

From there, the complications are quite humorous as Carole and Jude become Fedborough's newest odd couple in the eyes of the locals. Initial connections lead to pubs, more drinks, a timely dinner invitation, and lots of gossip about who has done what to whom in the past. Carole and Jude also recruit unlikely assistants (including the boy who found the torso) before the book is over.

The ending will probably not surprise you, but it presents far nicer questions of "what if" than most mysteries develop. I liked the ending best of the three books so far in the series. The ironies are pretty entertaining for those who love irony.

This book has a special treat in it for those who have wanted to know what Jude's last name is: You get two clues via the post man.

I found this too grisley for a supposedly "cozy British mystery." Not only is the murder macabre, but the details are dwelt upon gratuitiously and repeatedly. It's obvious by the third chapter why the body is in the state it's in, so the ending is not the Great Shock it's supposed to be. The only question is: who done it? I don't consider this a book to curl up with before bedtime, if that's what you're looking for.

I enjoyed the previous 2 Fethering Mysteries, and I also enjoyed the Charles Paris series. However, the dynamic here is wearing thin. If one deletes all the references to how New Agey Jude is compared to stick-in-the-mud Carole, the book would probably be 1/3 shorter. This one was a disappointment.

If you've read the first "fethering" mysteries, this book will delight! It's an easy read and has interesting twists. The ending was just a bit thin but, nonetheless, a fun book!

I love British cozies, which is why I read this, even though Simon Brett isn't known for creating interesting lead characters. His Fethering series are his best so far, but they are essentially 2-dimensional. My main problems with this book revolve around the lack of thought he put into the mystery itself...

<<<<SPOILERS AHEAD>>>>

For instance, if the police knew a body had been "smoked" after death, in a small village wouldn't the whole populace know because officers would be checking out the history of every smokehouse in town? Also, why would the police be tracking down previous owners of a property simply to ask them *when* they'd bought and sold it--isn't that a matter of looking up public property records? (Apparently Brett's police force is perpetually asleep at the wheel.) The final thing that irked me was the total NONSENSE of the ending--a person who is caught in the ACT of attempting murder cannot then be deemed "harmless". I'm sorry, but on this one there is only one possible conclusion: Brett's clueless.

Simon Brett is a clever enough writer that I still enjoyed this third "Fethering" mystery but I must admit that I thought that the plot -- the finding of a mysterious body, personality differences between the two leads Carole and Jude, and snobby English village inhabitants with A Secret -- a bit too reminscent of the first two books in the series. Also, one small detail really nagged at me: one of the characters has been through an acrimonious divorce where her husband left her for another woman and she can't stand him, but she still lets him stay in her flat when the police make him come back to town to be interviewed because he insists that he doesn't want to spend the money on a hotel. Although it is a minor point, it annoyed me: Why would she still bow to his wishes? Overall, though, the book includes enough clever writing and insightful characterization that I still plan to read the rest of the books in the series.